Some establishments address me in English and Spanish as well, but there is a third party that speaks to me in a loud monosyllabic Spanish reminiscent of how ignorant people address the deaf. These coffee shop and fast food restaurant workers treat me with a condescending brand of respect, or rather, costumer service that leaves me unsatisfied and wondering if it’s something personal. I speak both languages, and I do not have trouble being spoken to in either, but it’s insulting to be spoken to in charades. It is like a sort of ignorance that goes unchecked. It’s not mean or evil, but it sticks with you.

For example, a couple of months ago I went into a sandwich shop and my culinary artist told me — but not the people in front or behind me — that they just ran out of jalapeños.

I went on a quest recently to decipher where the epicenter between English and Spanish stood. Turns out its near The Coffee Bean.

I started my quest on the street corner where Avenida Cesar E. Chavez becomes Sunset Boulevard. I got as far as a coffee shop on Wilshire and Vermont when it happened. The young man behind the counter was a fresh-faced Asian gentleman with large, black-rimmed glasses. He looked like a hybrid of Malcolm X and Rivers Cuomo that had gone horribly wrong. As soon as he spotted me, he motioned to a second young man of Latino descent to come over. The Latino man was working hard at looking busy as he pushed around a mop that was not going anywhere. In a simultaneous motion the second young man took over the register like John Wayne commandeering a stage coach in one of his old films filled with blue-eyed Indians.

I took my time to find something that I wanted to order. I guess he mistook my indecisiveness for confusion.

“’qui vend… em.. os café” he said to me in a lowered voice that struggled to find the right verbs to marry with nouns. Spanish was definitely not his strong suit.

“I know, I was deciding between hazelnut and vanilla.” I replied, trying to find a smile on his face that was not there. I replied in English because I felt that he would put down his defenses and relent a little. We could be on the same page. He relented speaking Spanish, and now used a surfer lexicon of elongated words in English.

“So, um… what can I get started for you?”

I finally decided on hazelnut, but I was corrected in an automatic, yet chastising manner by the person behind the counter. It seemed that I had committed the egregious sin of ordering it as a “hazelnut coffee,” rather than a “hazelnut latte.” I felt like I would have to plead down to community service from the powerful International Coffee Court. After all, there are some things you cannot expunge from a criminal record.

He then suggested that I take my coffee to go because they were closing down and needed the time to begin cleaning up – even though the placard on the door read that their business hours were over at 10:00 PM and it was only 8:30, and the place was still littered with souls.

I drank my coffee, or latte rather, and wondered if this was a typical business practice. I mean, is it just me? Do I have the kind of face that make business sales and property values plummet? Am I so backwards and uncultured that dare to confuse a frappuccino with an iced coffee? I guess people just assume that I have that kind of face that leads people to conclude that I’m stupid enough to think that The Coffee Bean sells frijoles as opposed to coffee. Or something like that.